Adventures: walking, travel, PhD research experiences

Professor Emmy Van Deurzen

Emmy is the foremost existential psychotherapist in Europe, if not the world. She has written many books, runs the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London and has taught and inspired many of us. I hope you enjoy this wonderful interview.
Q. Briefly tell me your story (who are you? Where do you come from? Where are you going?)

I am a woman in my mid sixties and I was born in the Netherlands a few years after the end of the Second World War, to parents who had been through the occupation of the Netherlands and who thought themselves fortunate to have come through this ordeal alive. My identity was completely shaped around the sparse circumstances in which I grew up, sharing a box room with my elder sister, in a one and a half bedroom flat until I was seventeen and being acutely aware of how dangerous…